Description

Through its Datawire service, NewsGator aggregates approximately 1.6 million content sources on an hourly basis. This service used to be housed in their own data center; NewsGator recently moved this service to Windows Azure.

The VP of Mobile and Data Services, Walker Fenton, and Software Developer Brian Reischl describe tips and tricks of moving this high availability service which aggregates more than 3.25 million posts per day. The team tells ISV Architect Evangelist Bruce Kyle how they started with an existing ASP.NET application, but during the transition had to change how they thought about several facets of the solution – from technical aspects of storage and network connectivity to the business model.

Very important to them was team members need no longer carry a pager to handle issues in the day-to-day operations of the data center, such as hard drive failures. Brian says, "No one gets woken up in the middle of the night because an Azure hard drive has failed."

Walker describes the newness of the cost model — how seemingly small transactions can add up. He also talks of the deployment efficiencies, and how they no longer have the "one weird box" problem — where one machine in the data center is somehow different from the rest, and always causing headaches around deployment, scalability, and maintenance.

Founded in 2004 and with over 2.5 million paid users, NewsGator serves Fortune 200 and government knowledge workers across the globe – including Accenture, Biogen Idec, Charles Schwab, Deloitte, Edelman, Fujitsu, General Mills, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Kraft Foods, Novartis, Unisys Corporation, the United States Air Force, and the United States Army.